About Gabriel Hartley

Gabriel Hartley professes to “think about painting in a sculptural way,” as illustrated by his canvases on which “the paint becomes a material like plaster,” as he describes. Characterized by optical effects, bold linear brushstrokes, impasto, and elemental forms, Hartley’s paintings are notable for fusing dichotomies: depth and flatness, gloss and matte, painterly and photographic, and two- and three-dimensionality. For instance, in creating Pout (2010)—a gray-scale abstract painting referencing African masks and early Modernism’s experimentation with abstraction and perspective—Hartley added spray paint to the oil-based image to “give a light source and show the different excavations within the paint.” He works in the tradition of early-20th-century British painters including Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry, as well as the post-war Abstract Expressionists.

British, b. 1981, London, United Kingdom, based in London, United Kingdom